"I don't want to make Master Chief a girl and then have everybody go 'This guy is kind of like scared and running around.'"

That statement, offered by an unidentified audience member at the end of the "Connection Between Boys' Social Status, Gaming, and Conflict" panel at GDC 2014 this afternoon, hit the audience like a force of nature. The crowd's outrage was expressed with an exasperated groan that rolled across the room like a quick-moving thunderstorm.

Suggesting that fright was an inherently female characteristic—and that a female Spartan super soldier in the Halo universe could therefore not be as brave as the male Master Chief—might have been a slip of the unidentified attendee's tongue. But it's an example of the unconscious sexism that has historically gone unquestioned in the game industry.

This year's GDC has opened an entire advocacy track specifically to address these kinds of issues. It's a bold addition in the service of inspiring developers to make games that challenge dominant design paradigms, making those games more interesting in the process.

What would happen if Master Chief, in the face of overwhelming odds, expressed fear instead of spouting platitudes, which would feel right at home in an '80s action movie? "Boys are suffering greatly because they are afraid to ask for help," said Rosalind Wiseman, the author of The Guide: Managing Douchebags, Recruiting Wingmen, and Attracting Who You Want and an expert on bullying, ethical leadership, and how social media affects children's emotional and physical wellbeing.

Wiseman polled male children regarding what made someone "strong." Height, emotional detachment, athleticism, popularity with women, and skill at video games (short of being obsessed) were some of the answers she got. Those characteristics are the contents of the "act like a man box," said Wiseman, and they read like a direct description of a certain hero from an insanely popular science fiction franchise who wears green power armor and fights aliens.

According to the boys Wiseman polled, strong people didn't "act like a girl." Being easily upset, awkward, or having disabilities were also things the boys identified as making someone weak. "Our young people are feeling isolated, and sometimes video games provide an incredible way for them to link with other people," Wiseman said. If boys can ask for help, and they can use video games as a way to feel confident asking for help, game developers may actually be able to save lives.

Enlarge/ A slide showing which traits were considered "strong" (inside the box) and which ones were not.

Dennis Scimeca

Boys are conditioned to play certain types of video games like Halo or Call of Duty, Wiseman said, because those games enforce the behaviors that draw from the "act like a man box." These same characteristics tend to lead to popularity in school. Those games perpetuate the behaviors to be expected from boys who want to be perceived as being strong. The boys Wiseman polled were not blind to the way these games perpetuate expected behaviors for boys who want to be perceived as strong—and some of them didn't like it.

"Guys try to stay in that box and can never really be who they truly are," Wiseman quoted one student as saying. "When I moved here I always tried to be in the box and be cool but it never worked out and always made me miserable."

Boys cited first-person shooters and sports games as the genres that popular kids played by a very wide margin, but when Wiseman asked which games were popular at school, period, action/adventure games topped the list. Conclusion: Boys did not limit their game choices by what would make them popular. And when Wiseman asked boys whether they had ever played a game just because the popular kids were, almost 80 percent of them answered "no." In Wiseman's eyes, that reflects boys' resistance to in-the-box thinking on how they ought to act as boys.

Mapping perceptions of strength and weakness onto games is so pervasive that it spills into games which do not, on the surface, seem to require "strength" to play. Minecraft is not a game that encourages dominant, aggressive behavior, yet boys cited Minecraft as one of the most common games where they received verbal abuse from other players, no less so than when the same boys were playing Call of Duty.

If Master Chief expressed fear rather than always being a tough guy, he could be used as a tool to teach boys that they can accept themselves as emotionally nuanced people, Wiseman argued. If boys' only acceptable emotional outlet is anger, which is "strong," that anger leads to hate, which helps feed into the homophobia and sexism which is endemic in the video game audience. Emotional openness is the antidote to that, she said.

Empowerment is tied to "high status" traits like those within the "act like a man" box, but it doesn't have to mean encouraging players to act like assholes. "Culture is everything we've been told but never been sat down and taught," said Wiseman. "I want you to think about this in terms of dynamics of aggression. If it is human to be a part of a group, and it is, the culture that we live in is constantly giving off messages about what we should be like. This is about the mechanisms of how we teach degradation and bigotry.

"If you have a friend who's in the box, and he goes after someone who's outside of the box, you are not going to want to stand up for the person who's outside, even if you think what's happening is wrong, because then you literally get pushed to the outside," said Wiseman. "It is how silent bystanders become active perpetrators."

Changing the way developers think about their protagonists is the first step to making sure video games take themselves out of the "act like a man box." The more developers create emotionally nuanced heroes, the more other developers won't be able to remain as silent bystanders and refuse to make the same kinds of changes.

Dennis Scimeca is a freelance writer from Boston and has been published by Salon, Polygon, and NPR. Follow him on Twitter: @DennisScimeca.